


Double Event

by aliatori



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst and Feels, Canonical Character Death, Drift Compatibility, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24840358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliatori/pseuds/aliatori
Summary: It's been five years since Gladio lost his co-pilot, his Jaeger—and nearly his life. Resigned to spend the rest of his numbered days working the Wall, Gladio's plans change when a ghost from his past appears and makes him an offer he can't refuse.
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 4
Kudos: 48





	Double Event

**Author's Note:**

> I was privileged to write this AU for the Parallel Love Gladnis zine. [If you want to find more wonderful art and fics from other creators, please check out the Twitter account.](https://twitter.com/ParallelLoveGI)

Here in Lestallum, no one cares about Gladiolus Amicitia’s history—the history where he was once one of Eos’ greatest Jaeger pilots, now washed up with skin covered in more scars than tattoos. No one knows (or gives a damn) that those same scars run deeper than flesh, hold stronger than bone, disguise wounds that neither body nor mind can forget.

They _do_ care about his muscle, his stamina, and the fact he’ll take those most dangerous jobs on the construction sites of the Endless Wall without a second thought. As far as Gladio’s concerned… that suits him just fine.

The only monsters he’s looking to fight are the ones he has to live with.

* * *

One year becomes two becomes five whole years passing Gladio by. He follows the work around the coast, letting the days blur in pleasant, indistinct numbness, drowning his past, present, and future alike in the simple, brutal rhythm of keeping monsters at bay with towering sheets of adamantium and steel. It works for a while... until it doesn’t.

On both fronts.

He’s crowded in with the rest of the current work crew, all of them wearing exhaustion like a second skin. Gladio takes no pleasure in the tasteless military grade ration he spoons from its plastic container, nor from the stale, lukewarm water he washes the food down with. It’s fuel to keep his body going one more day—that’s all.

It’s what plays on the tiny screen at the front of the room that interests him more.

“We’re here with breaking news from Tenebrae, where early reports suggest a category-III kaiju of unknown variant has breached the Endless Wall and caused massive damage to the downtown core. The Council of Allied Nations has gathered to dispatch immediate relief aid to the area as well as call an emergency meeting to discuss the implications of the growing kaiju crisis.” The news anchor’s voice speaks while video footage from the attack loops on the screen.

The longer Gladio watches the kaiju smash through the Wall like wet toilet paper, the more the scars covering the left side of his body begin to itch and burn. The longer the news anchor talks about the Jaeger program having been ‘a temporary solution for a permanent problem’, the more Gladio’s thoughts turn to the last time he saw his co-pilot Noct alive; in those moments, he was ripped from both Jaeger and Drift in one fell swoop, nearly killing Gladio in the process.

‘Temporary problem’, they say, as though Gladio hadn’t lost a piece of his soul that day, as if they have any idea how difficult it is for him—for anyone—to live with that kind of loss.

(He thinks of Ignis for a fraction of a second before slamming the door shut on those memories with utter finality.)

He was a hero, once. Not anymore.

* * *

Gladio’s perched atop a shoddily erected piece of scaffolding, welding part of the frame that will eventually become a panel in Eos’ (useless) Wall, when the foreman bellows up to him from the level below.

“Amicitia! Get the hell down here!”

A spark of Gladio’s old fire ignites at the barked order. He’d like nothing more than to climb down, walk up to the foreman, and shove his torch where the sun don’t shine, but that’s not a person Gladio can afford to be any longer. The anger fades on the next exhale and Gladio climbs down, leaping off the final three metres and landing with far more grace than his height and bulk would suggest.

Gladio flips up his mask and approaches the foreman, arms folded over his barrel chest. “What?”

It shouldn’t be as gratifying as it is to see the foreman’s eyes take on a glint of wariness under his hard hat. He jerks his thumb backwards. “You got a visitor. Make it quick. I ain’t payin’ ya to talk.”

“You ain’t _payin’_ me much at all,” Gladio rumbles, clenching his jaw in an effort to tamp down on his flare of temper. “Who is it?”

The foreman shrugs, bushy eyebrows wiggling like mutant caterpillars on his face. “Like I asked. Go deal with it and get back to work.”

Never one to need to be told anything twice, Gladio heads towards the half-constructed shelter that serves as their ‘break room’ on the job. It barely provides shelter, but Gladio’s worked in worse conditions over the past five years.

It’s _who_ he sees when he enters the room that sets the world spinning on its axis.

Marshal Cor Leonis, silver medals immaculate on his pristine black uniform, stands at ease with his hands clasped behind his back.

What the hell is Cor doing here? More importantly, _why_ is he here?

“Gladio,” Cor says, clipped and dry. “You are not an easy man to track down.”

“Almost like I want it that way.”

Before losing Noct, Cor served as Gladio’s commanding officer, first in the Crownsguard and then as Marshal of the Jaeger program. Having the Marshal standing in front of him threatens to set his old life and present situation on a dangerous collision course, one Gladio isn’t sure he can withstand the shock of.

“I trust you’ve seen the news,” Cor says, glossing over Gladio’s objection in an all too familiar way.

“Can’t really avoid it. Don’t see the connection between the news and you showing up on my doorstep.”

“In case you haven’t realized, there’s still a war going on out there, one the Council seems determined to let us lose. To that end—and against their wishes—I’ve reinstated the Jaeger program and invited every pilot left in Eos to the Citadel for a final stand. You’ll be debriefed on the details once we arrive in Insomnia, but the relevant part to you is Royal Arms has been rebuilt. And it needs pilots.”

Gladio scoffs through a grin as fragile as glass. “Yeah, in case you don’t remember, that didn’t work out so hot for me last time.” He lifts his left arm, a messy webbing of melted skin and ink. “Can’t go through that again, Marshal.”

“It seems you’re under the impression that I’m asking. This is not a request.”

“So I’m supposed to walk off the job, follow you all the way back to the Citadel, and hope like hell I can still pilot a Jaeger to save the world?”

Cor closes his eyes, inhales, then comes to stand in front of Gladio until they’re nearly nose to nose. “Tell me, Gladio. Do you want to die out here, unknown and alone, or do you want to choose better? To know that if you die, it had meaning? Purpose?”

Cor’s words ignite a spark to an older fire—a flame of purpose he’d thought all but lost to time and grief. He used to be that man, and maybe, _just maybe_ , he can be that man again. 

All he has to do is say the words.

“I’m in.”

The Marshal gives a curt nod of acknowledgement, pivots on his heel, then pauses and glances over his shoulder. “And Gladio? Ignis Scientia is serving as Director of this program. I trust that won’t be an issue.”

“No, sir,” Gladio says, though the sudden ache in his chest at Cor’s proclamation lingers for hours to come.

* * *

There’s no point putting it off any more. The Marshal had given him exactly three days to get settled at the Citadel, and now that those three days are up, it’s time to find himself a co-pilot.

Which means seeing Ignis.

Gladio stares at the sea green, rust speckled door as though the handle might bite him. He’s been welcomed back with open arms by his fellow pilots—Nyx, Crowe, Aranea, Luna, even Ravus. Those reunions had even felt _good_ , a welcome sense of camaraderie compared to the survival mode he’d been operating in for the past five years, competing with the rest of the working class to eke out his next meal. Felt good enough he wondered why he didn’t come back sooner.

It’s the reunion with Ignis that worries him. Ignis, who had always been his best friend, who came to be his partner until a fateful encounter with the category-III kaiju known as Leviathan. The two of them… Gods, it had been ugly. Both of them hurting so much that the only thing they knew how to do was to hurt each other. To layer wound upon wound for maximum devastation in their mutual grief.

Neither of them ended their final argument with clean hands. Neither of them had looked back or reached out, and Gladio can’t help but wonder if the possibility of rebuilding a bridge has burned right along with the one he set on fire.

Still… Gladio has been called many things in his life, but coward has never been one of them, so he takes a deep breath and opens the door to the training room.

And there he is.

Time marks its passage across Ignis’ features in ways Gladio would have to be blind to notice: more scars, longer hair swept back from his face in an elegant pompadour, a different style of rimless glasses perched on the aquiline bridge of his nose. Despite facing down the apocalypse, he’s dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, his long fingers curled around his weapon of choice—a clipboard.

(Not his only weapon of choice. Gladio knows all too well how Ignis wields words like daggers, and daggers themselves like death.)

The eyes remain unchanged. Spring green, bright, calculating, stunning. All the more gorgeous when softened by love, all the more intimidating when sharpened by thought.

Like now.

“Gladiolus.” Ah, the full name. Ignis, all business.

“Iggy. Good to see you,” Gladio says, finding to his surprise that he means it. He crosses the room and extends his hand to Ignis. A peace offering.

Ignis gives him a full once over with his eyes alone before they flick up to meet Gladio’s. His lips twitch in a stifled expression as he takes Gladio’s hand.

“Likewise.”

Gladio might imagine the tender squeeze that follows Ignis’ firm grip like an aftershock. He hopes he doesn’t.

* * *

“Might I make a bold suggestion?”

Gladio’s all ears at this point. It’s been two weeks of searching for a drift compatible partner with zero results. Between the Marshal, Ignis, and Gladio himself, it’s only a matter of time before someone cracks.

It’s also time they don’t have. The kaiju attacks are growing both in intensity and frequency, and they need to get Royal Arms in the action as soon as possible.

“Go ahead,” the Marshal says.

“I’d like to present myself as an option for pilot candidacy.”

Gladio whirls around to face Ignis. “No.” A surge of protectiveness, an urge he lost the right to long ago, swells within him. “You can’t.”

“I think it rather presumptuous—and audacious, might I add—for you of all people to tell me what I can and cannot do,” Ignis shoots back, pushing the bridge of his glasses up his nose with two fingers.

“Oh yeah? But you can, right? Because the way I remember, you sure thought you had the right of things nine times out of ten.”

A faint flush creeps into Ignis’ cheeks as he sets his clipboard down a little too loudly on the nearby table. “How would you know when you stopped listening to me after Noctis passed?” he asks, tone all calm, deadly precision.

Words like daggers aimed at the heart.

The dam inside Gladio’s heart breaks and through it floods every emotion he’s been denying for five long years—grief, rage, sorrow, love, loss, pain. He stomps over to the rack at the side of the room and grabs a second quarterstaff.

“You want to find out if we’re compatible? Fine. Let’s do this shit,” Gladio snarls, tossing the practice weapon to Ignis. “I won’t hold back.”

Ignis, of course, catches the quarterstaff in midair. It’s now that Gladio notices Ignis forewent the suit today. Which means he was planning this. Because Ignis always has a damn plan. More emotions spill from the jagged crevice inside him and Gladio resolves to channel them through the weapon in his hand.

“Neither will I,” Ignis says, stepping forward onto the mats.

Gladio barely waits until Ignis is in the starting position before lunging forward, using his superior reach to bound across the distance. He swings his own staff overhead and brings it within millimeters of Ignis’ forehead.

“One zero.”

Ignis, in a display of deadly grace and speed, bats Gladio’s staff away with a flourish and slices his own weapon back to Gladio’s face, bisecting it in a neat vertical line.

“One one,” he says.

Gladio growls and stabs forward, beginning the true whirlwind of the match. Hollow clacking echoes through the small training room, the knock of wood against wood, blows with enough force to hurt but not permanently injure. The harsh pants of their exhales fill the spaces between, their bodies revolving around each other on an axis composed of their connection. Ignis is incredibly fast, but not fast enough to evade Gladio’s shoulder in his midsection; Gladio uses the momentum from Ignis’ stumble to flip him over his back and throw him to the ground, then brings his quarterstaff to Ignis’ neck.

“Two one,” Gladio rumbles.

Ignis springs up from the ground and redoubles his offense. Only the thin press of his lips alludes to his own anger. He is precision and fury on two legs, limbs moving in ways that expend zero extraneous effort. Gladio, on the other hand, is as explosive as he has always been in combat, wide swings and loud bellows and blunt force.

He doesn’t see the opening his last move created until he’s flat on the ground, his leg levered up in an unforgiving submission hold by Ignis, Ignis’s staff threaded between Gladio’s thigh and torso.

“Enough!” Cor barks.

As Cor calls the end of the match, Gladio stares up at Ignis, tension stretching like a palpable thread between them. Both of their chests rise and fall with deep, heavy breaths. Their bodies connect at several points and the sensation of skin on skin electrifies and terrifies. 

In an instant, the emotions bleeding from the crumbled dam inside Gladio become still and quiet. He is empty of the anger he carried on his shoulders for thousands of kilometres and days alike, right back to the Citadel where he gained it in the first place.

They should have had this fight in the beginning, Gladio decides. Maybe it would have meant five less years spent away from Ignis, from his closest friend and confidante in Eos.

Ignis gives the barest hint of a smirk. “You know I’m the one.”

Gladio gets up from his prone position on the ground and offers his own grin back. “You always have been.”

* * *

After a deep breath, Gladio speaks six words he never thought he’d say again. “Royal Arms, ready and aligned, sir.”

“This is Marshal Cor Leonis. Neural handshake initiating in fifteen seconds,” blares the Marshal’s voice over the intercom.

_Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve..._

Gladio turns—as best he can in black armor with myriad plugs that connect him to the Jaeger—to face Ignis. “Not sure I’m ready for you to be inside my head,” he says, affecting a smirk as he speaks.

_Eleven, ten, nine, eight..._

“And I’m rather certain I never left your mind at all,” Ignis responds.

_Seven, six, five, four…_

“Might be onto something, Iggy.”

_Three, two, one…_

“I suppose we’ll find out.”

Gladio flows into the Drift.

* * *

_Memories, fluid and formless, belonging to both and neither of them._

_A toddler Iris laughing as she runs through a field of flowers. Noct laying beside Ignis with a sky full of stars overhead. A gladiolus flower crushed in a palm, red flowers peeking out like blood between Gladio’s knuckles. Ignis, watching from the observation deck as Gladio and Noct go to slay another kaiju._

_A funeral for a beloved leader and father. Ignis’ arm around Gladio’s shoulders as he weeps._

_Noct’s twilight eyes. A ripping, tearing loss. The sinuous, crushing coils of Leviathan wrapped around the Jaeger. Burning scars. The flow deepens, becomes a whirlpool, threatens to drown them both in an abyss of loss._

_A brighter path, one demarcated by the soothing cadence of Ignis’ voice._

_Ignis’ smile as Gladio agrees to go on their first date. The thread of their fingers together in solid connection. Gladio’s heartbeat beneath Ignis’ ear. A kiss to Ignis’ temple. The warmth of their lips pressed together, of Ignis’ palm cupping Gladio’s cheek. The strength of Gladio’s grip as Ignis is lifted into his embrace._

_Relief like a full system cascade as Gladio, with longer hair and heavier gait, walks through the training room door. Comes home to Ignis._

_A whole tapestry of memory fragments that, if followed and woven, would tell their story._

_They have always been entwined before this moment, their lives and their bodies and their hearts, and now…_

_They are together in a way neither could have imagined._

_Whole._

_Ready._

* * *

“Neural handshake strong and holding,” the chipper voice of Prompto Argentum declares over the speaker.

The next voice that speaks is the Marshal’s. “Gentlemen… your orders are to reconnitor and eliminate the Scourge-class kaiju threat Bahamut. Copy?”

“Copy,” Gladio replies.

There’s never any true silence in a Jaeger—not in the cockpit or in the Drift—but the closest approximation passes between them now. 

“Ready to save Eos?” Gladio asks with an easy smirk.

The earnestness of Ignis’ reply takes him by surprise. “You should know by now I’m always prepared. Even more so with you by my side.”

Emotion swells in Gladio’s chest like a tidal wave. He turns to Ignis—to his co-pilot, his friend, his maybe something more if they both live through the battle to come—and finds his gaze already waiting, green eyes bright behind the helmet’s visor. Gladio opens his mouth to offer an apology (for leaving, for staying gone, for giving up on their partnership when he has never been a quitter) before realizing… Ignis is inside his head.

He already knows.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Kudos and comments are appreciated if you enjoyed.


End file.
